TSM Episode 46: Revenge of the Bup

Deimosion and Lusipurr attempt to discuss the opinions of Shigeru Miyamoto and Markus Persson, but Bup disrupts the reporting with a bumper crop of non-news. When SiliconNooB finally makes his own tardy appearance, the podcast truly goes off the rails.

I can’t physically agree any more with Nate about the Gervais/Pilkington relationship between Lusipurr and Nate on this podcast. Literally, if I agreed more then something in me would physically break.

I assume you have an internet connection, look it up! And then come back to me and say you’re not amused because I honestly don’t think it’s the kind of thing you’d find funny. So, basically I’m demanding you waste your time. Do it!

Super Mario RPG is, I’d say, the only RPG ever to have forced and repeatable mini-games that didn’t make me want to kill myself.

I wasn’t able to do the Dirge with this playthrough, but it’s been about two years since I played FFVI, and I think that’s the best FF game, so I’ll play it again. People play RPGs for the story and such, but what makes it remarkable is that yes the story is great, but it’s equally matched by the gameplay and character progression/customization. Where Mass Effect 3 recently shit the bed in the last ten minutes with Deus Ex Machina and no resolution on what happened to the myriad characters we’d come to love FFVI had a twenty minute ending showing each character and showing the completed character arc that they’d gone through over the coarse of the game and how they’d grown and matured. People hated on FFVII’s ending for being too ambiguous, but FFVI managed to pull it off. It was ambiguous, but hopeful.

I haven’t read the comic, but the movie adaptation of V For Vendetta sort of did the same thing. “You’re free. Sink or swim, but you’ll do so of your own merits and volition.” It was like not being given a happy ending, but being able to make one for yourself. Which in contrast to the utter destroyed hopelessness of the third act I found pretty moving.

There was also the lack of a real main character that makes the game unique. It’s sort of Terra in the beginning and sort of Celes at the end, but not really. With the exception, except Mog, of the optional bonus characters everyone really got fleshed out over the coarse of the game and through the hidden, optional bonus missions in the second half. I’m kind of unsure which version of the game to recommend people play. The original release was great and is easy to get on Virtual Console, etc. But the GBA rerelease has a slightly better translation, but also has a brutally raped and murdered musical score. What was “MOG’S CHARM” in the original, the No Random Encounters thing that made that magician’s tower thing playable, was “Molulu’s Charm” in the GBA version. Molulu was the fellow, I like to think female, Moogle who fought aside Mog in the Cave’s of Narshe in that maze battle thing against Kefka. And you only found it by clicking an unmarked spot behind where you found Mog after the world was destroyed.

And speaking of Kefka, has any videogame had a better villain? He accomplished everything he set out to do. He murdered millions of people purely because he was crazy and it amused him. He won. People like to say Sephiroth is better, but due to the terrible Sony translation mostly don’t even realize that you only actually see Sephiroth in the Nibelheim flashback upstairs in that hotel, in the northern crater when Cloud hands over the Black Materia, and in that final battle plummeting in the other Northern Crater. The rest of the time the “and he can fly now, for some reason” Sephiroth appearances are Jenova. Hence those all caps JENOVA fights that commence immediately after them. (Sony apparently thought injecting poor bastards with Jenova cells made them “clones” because they don’t have a dictionary or Internet access to find out what a clone is.) The point is that in FFVII Sephiroth is a whiny, mostly absent, silver-haired, girly man with mommy issues who mostly doesn’t even do anything. Shinra dropping a pizza slice of Midgar onto the poor bastards on Section 6 and the Planet’s own Weapons accrue a higher body count I’d wager. FFVII is by no means a bad game, but I just think that FFVI not despite, but probably because of the severe technological limitations, just excels as one of the best games ever made.

Kefka is the very best FF villain for precisely the reasons you enumerate. He succeeded. He ruled the earth for substantial period of time. He beat the party. They came back and kicked his ass, but not until AFTER he had achieved his ends. Which is like beating up a bully AFTER he has taken your lunch money, bought a cake, and eaten it.